Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing – serie

«Reimagining the Family is a ground-breaking volume that brings together important literary voices. Robert Payne explores literary representations of lesbian mothering with sensitivity, depth and rigour. This highly innovative, well-researched and well-written book will be essential reading for researchers across a wide spectrum of fields.»(Professor Natalie Edwards, The University of Adelaide)«Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature is the first study of lesbian mothering in French literature, providing a valuable contribution to studies in LGBT+ literature, women’s writing, and mothering among others. The book is thoughtful, well-researched, and creates a foundation upon which future explorations of lesbian or queer parenting in French literature will be built.» (Jessica Garcés Jensen, H-France Review Vol. 23 (March 2023), No. 42)Reimagining the Family is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centred around the notion of «reimagining», the book examines how literature interrogates the normative definition of the family as a heterosexual, biological unit. It discusses a range of themes, including the difficulty of reconciling lesbianism with mothering, the role of the father, the identity of the co-mother and issues of difference and equality. The corpus includes both well-known and previously unstudied authors, and covers a range of genres, from autobiography to popular fiction. Collectively, the texts offer privileged insights into the increasingly relevant experiences of lesbian mothers and illustrate the changing face of the family in twenty-first-century France.

‘Feminine Plural shows that a revolution is taking place in literature written in Portuguese and Spanish. After many years of being silenced by dictatorships, colonial injustice, and systemic problems of access to education, women from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America are not only making their voices heard, but also, in the process, creating previously unseen literary forms in order to be able to tell their previously untold stories. I had not known how important it was to examine recent life-writing by women in my own language until I had this book in my hands. And if I needed proof that a personal story is more than a small cog in the mechanics of the world, this is it.’ – Susana Moreira Marques, writer ‘For several decades now, women’s autobiographical writing has been flourishing. Many women writers narrate their personal experience, marked out by their condition of womanhood, by experiences such as their relationship with their mothers, migration, adoption, racism, motherhood, the rural world, infertility, sexuality, exile … In this well-documented and entertaining book, two great experts in Luso-Hispanic women’s literature, Maria-José Blanco and Claire Williams, introduce and guide the reader through this vast new field of writing.’ – Laura Freixas, writer In the short period since our volume Feminine Singular came out, life-writing by women in the Luso-Hispanic world has proliferated, justifying another book of essays on the topic. Not only are more women choosing to write (about) themselves, they are doing so in innovative ways that cross conventional generic boundaries. They openly discuss previously taboo subjects, speak out against injustice and provoke changes in policy and attitudes. Furthermore, they embrace plurality, by recognising the achievements of their foremothers and celebrating their peers; expressing themselves through fragmentation and collage; and, ultimately, working and reading and writing together. These essays introduce an Anglophone readership to some of the most exciting and audacious Luso-Hispanic women writing and making art today. They bring together a mixture of personal essays and short fiction, alongside more traditional literary critical research, to show what women’s life-writing can do.

"This excellent volume—the first book-length study in English on Despentes’s writing—is rich, timely and insightful. Schaal’s rigorous analysis contextualises Despentes’s work carefully in relation to contemporary writing and thought, highlighting its intersections with gender theory, in particular. The book is the fruit of extensive knowledge of Despentes’s work across several media and will be of interest to students and scholars in gender studies, literary studies and contemporary cultural studies." (Professor Natalie Edwards, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Professor of Literature in French, University of Bristol) "Schaal’s academic treatment of Despentes’s work manages to maintain the appealing edge of the author’s approach while exercising impressive critical astuteness. The book is thoughtfully considered: from the Reflexivity and Positionality Statement that opens the book to the pedagogically minded vast bibliography at the end. Grrrl Writing will appeal to scholars and students interested in Despentes, French feminisms, political fiction, and women writers in an increasingly self-reflexive literary economy." (Anne Brancky, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Vassar College)"Schaal offers us a very exhaustive study of Despentes’s novels from Baise-moi to Cher connard. The author engages with all current criticism (in French and English) to demonstrate the evolution of the politics and aesthetics of protest that Despentes’s novels perform. Questions of social vulnerability and fragility assigned by (sexual or racial) identities are at the center of Schaal’s reflections. This book is a must-read if you want to undertake research on the author Despentes and the French feminist protest novel." (Catherine Mavrikakis, Professor, Département des littératures de langue française, Université de Montreal)When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi [Rape Me] in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first to adopt a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes’s novels and evolution as an author. Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes [The Learned Bitches, 1996], and Les Jolies choses [Pretty Things, 1998]. The study specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of a still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes’s Grrrl writing denounces how heteropatriarchy engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well.

Mothers and mothering are significant features of contemporary women’s writing in France and mothers are narrators and key protagonists in nearly all Marie NDiaye’s novels and short stories. These mothers rarely strike the reader as attractive personalities and, in their mothering role, are portrayed as inadequate, abusive or even murderous. A pattern of maternal failure is passed on from mother to daughter and the relationship between mothers and daughters is one of rejection and suppression. This book explores what this negative representation tells us about mothers and about how mothers represent their own mothering to themselves. Close readings of text and intertext are at the centre of the analytic approach, embracing references to existing commentaries on the author and to the psychoanalytic, mythological, religious and literary background against which NDiaye’s mothers demand to be read.

«In this important comparative study, Polly Galis provides an illuminating – and frank – examination of the feminist tensions inherent in the inclusive and often transgressive modalities of female sexuality put forward by Nancy Huston, Nelly Arcan and Annie Ernaux, writers whose work subversively troubles the divide between 'good' and 'bad' models of bodily pleasure and desire.» (Siobhán McIlvanney, Professor of French and Francophone Women’s Writing, King’s College London)«An in-depth look at three important French-language women writers who tackle gender stereotypes, desire, the body, language and empowerment, this richly documented study is rigorous, thorough, illuminating and highly readable, with broader implications for contemporary feminism and women’s writing within and beyond France and Quebec. A major contribution.» (Lori Saint-Martin, Professor of Literary Studies, University of Quebec in Montreal)This book is the first comparative study of the work of Francophone authors Annie Ernaux, Nancy Huston and Nelly Arcan, exploring their representation of sex, sexuality and the body. This book examines their narrative treatment of dominant sexual discourses, sexual difference and diverse feminine bodily experience, and thereby reveals these writers’ distinctive contribution to contemporary women’s writing in French and different feminisms, defined as «frank» French feminism. This feminist approach consists in tackling gender inequality, sexism and misogyny, while recognising the difficulties involved in feminist action, and acknowledging that adherence to allegedly oppressive gender stereotypes can actually prove enjoyable and empowering for women. This study examines the authors’ earliest to latest publications and multiple genres and media, including fictional and autofictional novels, autobiographies, critical essays, phototexts, diaries, journals, illustrated oeuvres, media addresses and newspaper articles.This book project was the Winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French.

‘Making original use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "minor literature" and its power to shift boundaries and enable new forms of becoming, Roberto Binetti reads the work of Italian women poets who transform the contours of lyric poetry and its political valencies. An exemplary account of how new lyric voices can break down binary oppositions while finding different forms of subjectification and self-representation.’ – Jonathan Culler, Cornell University Poetics of Becoming: Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies explores the work of Elsa Morante, Amelia Rosselli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Biancamaria Frabotta, examining how their poetry redefined lyric subjectivity in 1970s Italy. Engaging with feminist theory and cultural history, the book interrogates the category of scrittura femminile and its limitations, considering how these poets navigated questions of political agency, heterodox experimentalism, and marginalization within a male-dominated literary canon. Through close readings and comparative analysis, it highlights their responses to the feminist movement, postwar Italian politics, and philosophical debates. The study argues that their poetry enacts a process of ‘becoming’, destabilizing fixed identities and expanding the boundaries of lyric expression as a site of both resistance and renewal. Poetics of Becoming reimagines the relationship between gender, politics, and poetics, offering a new framework for understanding women's poetry in modern Italy.

Women Writing War focuses on the life-writing of the moudjahidate, the women veterans of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962). The author offers close readings of memoir, testimonial, poetry and drama by Jacqueline Guerroudj, Louisette Ighilahriz, Anna Gréki, Zhor Zerari and Myriam Ben, all of whom are documented moudjahidate and self-identify as Algerian. Reading their life-writing through the prism of theories of intertextuality, ‘minor’ literature and the dialectics of memory and trauma, the author explores the relationship between writing, resistance and political action. Since they compose their work in the first-person voice in the context of the Algerian war, this book argues that their writing operates collectively as a form of counterdiscourse, opening up a textual space where experiences that were previously silenced or marginalized might be expressed.

Disgust is a strong, immediate visceral reaction. While it may feel like a purely instinctive response, the cultural meanings ascribed to particular objects, bodies or behaviours play a significant role in determining whether or not they are experienced as disgusting. This interplay between bodies and ideas makes disgust a powerful source of metaphor in narrative fiction. For women’s writing, disgust is particularly problematic due to a misogynistic tradition in which the female body has often been coded as disgusting.This book offers a comparative study of recently published texts by eight female authors writing in French and German – Marie Darrieussecq, Amélie Nothomb, Lorette Nobécourt, Alina Reyes, Sibylle Berg, Jenny Erpenbeck, Monika Maron and Charlotte Roche – in terms of an aesthetics of disgust and asks to what extent disgust can be seen as a useful tool for feminist criticism. Since the late 1990s there have been increasing levels of academic interest in disgust in various disciplines, ranging from clinical psychology to aesthetics and moral philosophy. As one of the first full-length studies to consider literary uses of disgust, this book both contributes to the emerging field of disgust theory and offers a new contribution to the study of women’s writing.

Experiment and Experience is a collection of critical essays on twenty-first-century women-authored literature in France. In particular, the volume focuses on how contemporary women’s writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Authors covered include well-established names, the ‘new generation’ of writers who first came to the fore of the French literary scene in the 1990s and whose work has now matured into an important œuvre, as well as new emerging writers of the 2000s, whose work is already attracting scholarly and critical attention. Within the overarching theme of ‘experiment and experience’, the contributors explore a range of issues: identities, family relations, violence, borders and limits, and the environment. They consider fiction, autobiography, writing for the theatre, autofiction and other hybrid genres and forms. Their analyses highlight difficult issues, refreshing perspectives and exciting new themes at the start of the new millennium and moving forward into the coming decades.

Strange Adventures examines portrayals of womanhood in the works of prize-winning French author Pierrette Fleutiaux. Fleutiaux’s refreshing pictures of womanhood offer insights into how women can become more whole, substantial and free in themselves and in their relationships, as well as how they can contribute to the external world through their creativity and leadership. The study demonstrates how Fleutiaux’s heroines navigate the external, bodily and inner situations of adolescence, early adult life, marriage, motherhood, maturity, leadership and death, in the process developing greater inner resources of wisdom, compassion and resilience. This volume considers selections from Fleutiaux’s œuvre, from her first short fiction Histoire de la chauve-souris to her recent Loli le temps venu, including Métamorphoses de la reine (Goncourt de la nouvelle) and Nous sommes éternels (Prix Femina). Using a theoretical framework which draws on Jungian concepts and the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, the study analyses women’s individuation trajectories at each stage of life. Throughout, Fleutiaux’s depictions are shown to pose a challenge to existing conceptions of womanhood and individuality, thus opening up new understandings of what it means to be a woman, and to be human.

The decision to reject motherhood is the subject of several key works of literature in French since the new millennium. This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. The book explores how women narrate their decision not to mother, the issues that they face in doing so and the narrative techniques that they employ to justify their stories. It asks how these authors challenge stereotypes of the childless woman by claiming their own identity in narrative, publicly proclaiming their right to choose and writing a femininity that is not connected to motherhood.Using feminist, sociological and psychoanalytic theories to interrogate non-mothering, this work is the first book-length study of narratives that counter this long-standing taboo. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity.

The motif of the ‘identity quest’ features strongly in much contemporary French women’s writing, but nowhere more so than in the work of Nina Bouraoui. Author of numerous books since 1991 and winner of the 2005 Prix Renaudot, Bouraoui persistently explores the question of self-expression in her work, experimenting with a variety of self-representational modes and emphasising the importance of language to the construction of her sense of self.Considering the textual identities produced through Bouraoui’s work in the period 1999–2011, this book examines how self-referential writing can represent a crucial act of resistance to a number of contemporary problems, including race, gender and social isolation. Using the work of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler to theorise the transformative potential of the literary text, the author proposes autofiction as a uniquely unrestricted space, which for writers such as Bouraoui may provide the only medium through which to formulate a coherent and manageable sense of self.

This book explores the different treatment of writing by women andwriting by men in twenty-first-century Spain. Focusing on contemporarySpanish authors Ana María Matute (1926–2014), Rosa Montero (1952–),and Lucía Etxebarria (1966–), the author examines how Spanish womenwriters are marketed in Spain and, in particular, how current marketingstrategies reinforce traditional structures of femininity.Through an analysis of their work and lives in the context of the FrancoRegime, the Transition to democracy and contemporary Spain, this bookprovides an innovative study of the construction of the public personaeof these key female writers. As social media and the internet transformauthors’ relationship with their readers, the rapidly shifting publishingindustry offers an important context for the difficult balance betweenhigh levels of reception and visibility and the persistence of traditionalgender stereotypes.

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and troubled relationships with food and bodies have been depicted by writers across a variety of languages and cultures, since before the medicalisation of eating disorders in the late nineteenth century to the present day. This cross-cultural volume explores the fictional portrayal of these self-destructive yet arguably self-empowering behaviours in contemporary French, German and Italian womens writing. Covering autobiography, fiction and autofiction, the chapters included here outline different aspects of the cultural encodings of anorexia in Europe today. Contributors analyse how literary texts not only recount but also interrogate wider cultural representations of eating disorders, particularly with regard to concepts of (gender) identity, the body, the relationship with the mother, and the relation between food and words. This volume seeks to draw out the multiple meanings of anorexia as both a rebellion against and conformity to dominant (and gendered) socio-political structures. It explores the ways in which contemporary womens novels and memoirs both describe and, importantly, also redefine eating disorders in present-day Europe.